Can a 111-year-old car cope with modern life?

How well can a veteran car cope with the tasks we take for granted in a modern hatchback? We put a 1904 Vauxhall to the test to find out

There are just a handful of folk alive who would have been babes in arms when this car was made, 111 years ago, at the Vauxhall Iron Works on Wandsworth Road in south London, by a company founded by Alexander Wilson, a talented Scottish marine engineer. So it’s a survivor, this Vauxhall 6HP, of two world wars, a company move to Luton and the vicissitudes of fortune and fashion.

In 1925 it was squirrelled away at the house of Vauxhall director Percy Kidner, just in case General Motors, Vauxhall’s new owner, saw it as an asset to sell. It was restored in the Sixties and had extensive front-end work a few years ago when Vauxhall’s managing director, Bill Parfitt, had to take avoiding action.

In fact, as Andrew Boddy, senior vehicle restorer with Vauxhall’s historic fleet, says in his typically blunt manner: “It’s a bit smoke-and-mirrors, the history. One story has it that the car never left Vauxhall’s ownership, but since it was first sold through Gould Brothers of Exeter it most probably had a history in private hands, just a short one. There’s also a story that it was exported and then repatriated from Australia. That’s simply not true.”

Andrew English tests the Vauxhall 6HP to see how far modern cars have comeCredit:
ANDREW CROWLEY

The 6HP was the second-ever Vauxhall model and this one was made less than six months after Wilbur and Orville Wright’s heavier-than-air “Flyer” soared 850 feet along the beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. It had tiller steering, which probably came from the firm’s marine origins, a system superseded by a steering wheel in September 1904. It also had foot- and hand-operated brakes, and was based on a wood-and-metal monocoque chassis, with coil-sprung axles located to the frame by tie rods.

If that was advanced, the engine was pretty conservative. A single-cylinder, 1,029cc, long-stroke motor, with an atmospheric inlet valve and a mechanically actuated exhaust valve, it produced 6bhp at 900rpm and was produced in-house by Vauxhall, along with the trembler coil ignition and spray carburettor. The twin epicyclic gears and the clutch are both based on slip rings, with the gears simply placing a different set of friction pads into contact with the massive flywheel.

How far have we come since? We sought to find out by spending a day doing the things that us 21st-century folk do with our cars without a thought. Remember, this Edwardian veteran was built in the year Rolls-Royce was formed, Anton Chekhov died and J M Barrie’s Peter Pan debuted at the Duke of York’s Theatre.

First off was a track day, but with a difference. Karun Chandhok has raced in Formula One, GP2, Formula E and the Le Mans 24 Hours and, as it turned out, he’s a good sport. We caught him receiving coaching from the legendary Rob Wilson at Bruntingthorpe airfield. Of course, we asked nicely: could he perhaps drive a lap in the old Vauxhall? Despite having raced at the Goodwood Revival in a Jaguar E-type, Chandhok admitted that the oldest car he’d ever driven was a Hindustan Ambassador, the former Fifties Morris Oxford and one-time staple transport of India, his home country.

Karun Chandhok and Rob Wilson drive the 6HP to see how it compares with a Formula One carCredit:
ANDREW CROWLEY

“You’re crazy, you English,” he laughed. They tentatively approached the 6HP wheezing and clattering on its springs. Wilson seemed horrified, while Chandhok looked quizzically at me and made steering-wheel gestures with his hands. A grinning Terry Forder, Vauxhall vehicle restorer, showed the nonplussed Chandhok the ropes before he and Wilson puttered off for a flying lap under instruction.

Tiller steering is not for the faint-hearted. It is darty, like a ferret on a lead. Left turns involve pulling the short lever awkwardly into your tummy, and then there’s the thought that any kind of impact could involve the driver being skewered like a cocktail sausage. Chandhok and Wilson reached the grand speed of 22mph on the straight and posted a lap time of 8min 21sec against a modern Vauxhall Astra hatchback’s time of 1min 51sec. Mishaps on the way included Wilson grabbing the tiller to prevent himself being pitched off the side (“Get off,” cried Chandhok, “that’s the bloody steering”) and a near miss at the hairpin where Wilson instructed his pupil to hit the barriers rather than risk rolling the hard-charging car. “It’s very pure,” said Chandhok above the idling din. “You have to feel every nuance, every sound. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like back in the day when you didn’t even have Tarmac roads.”

Next up was the acceleration test, again not strictly conventional. Over 100 metres, against a middle-aged, 82kg man in trainers (that would be me, then), the 323kg 6HP, driven by Vauxhall PR Simon Hucknall, was soundly beaten, with a time of 19.2sec against my 15.3sec.

Andrew English races the 6HP over 100 metresCredit:
ANDREW CROWLEY

No time to tarry as we had to deliver Hucknall’s son George to Lutterworth High School. But having done so, the old 6HP resolutely refused to restart. The starting handle emerges from the side of the engine and such is the mighty compression that you only get a few swings before your back gives in. George’s fellow pupils looked on in amusement as we failed to coax the car into life. “Well it’s certainly different,” muttered a blushing George. “I didn’t want to attract this much attention.”

We trailered the recalcitrant beast to Forest Gate Vauxhall, where mechanic Tom Yates and restoration apprentice Chris Smith persuaded the Edwardian into life. So we went shopping, at Sainsbury’s in Market Harborough, where we bought a Christmas tree. Frankly, negotiating the car park was terrifying. It was like a RoSPA safety video, with no brakes, festive season-addled shoppers reversing without looking, pedestrians, children and dogs, while driving what consists of a big piece of unfenced machinery. It was exhausting so we decided to eat.

It's the most wonderful time of the yearCredit:
ANDREW CROWLEY

While the idea of the drive-through service was dreamed up in the United States in the Thirties, the first drive-through McDonald’s didn’t open until 1975 at an Arizona military base where soldiers weren’t allowed to get out of their cars in uniform. So this is certainly the first time the old Vauxhall will have idled in a queue for a hamburger (by this time we didn’t dare stop it). The Vauxhall sustained itself at a rate of about 30mpg. It also needed a bit of coolant when it overheated at the supermarket, a spot of oil (with which it anointed all its stopping places) and the expert attentions of Boddy, Forder and Smith to enable it to do the job that most of us barely think about when we turn the key.

In 1904 The Autocar reported that a 6HP’s “average cost of running [daily] has worked out one-third that of the upkeep of my horse”. Vauxhall built 44 that year at 130 guineas (£136.50) each which, according to the Bank of England inflation adjuster, would be £14,824.19 today. With a bit of discount, that sum will just about get you behind the wheel of the base-model new Astra.

Our 6HP cost 130 guineas in 1904Credit:
ANDREW CROWLEY

In 1904 average craft wages in the building industry were 33 pence a day, so it would take a skilled worker 123 years to buy a 6HP. These days it takes an average worker about 30 weeks to pay for an Astra. Changed times indeed. And perhaps in another 111 years, pouring petrol into a machine to get it to run will seem as anachronistic as it was 111 years ago.

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